The National Interest - National security, national insecurity

But as any savvy insurance agent discovers, there is no end to what might
be insured. Buying a house? Insure the house, of course, but also ensure
the mortgage payments. Taking a vacation? Insure against bad weather.

Likewise for the United States during the Cold War. America's
assorted alliance systems— NATO, SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty
Organization), CENTO (Central Treaty Organization), the Rio Pact, ANZUS
(the Pacific Security Treaty among Australia, New Zealand, and the United
States)—insured not primarily against attacks on the United States
but against attacks on countries related, in one way or another, to
American security. Pakistan offered electronic listening posts and
launchpads for spy planes. Australia pledged troops to the defense of the
Middle East, whose oil then meant little to America directly (the United
States still exported oil) but meant much to Western Europe. South Vietnam
mattered psychologically: if that wobbling domino fell, it would unsettle
the neighbors and might ultimately ruin the neighborhood.

This would be bad for American business, which had a bottom-line interest
in preserving as much of the world as possible for market penetration. It
would also be bad for American morale. Since Plymouth Rock and the
"city on the hill" John Winthrop had promised next door at
Boston, Americans had always considered themselves the wave of the future.
Two communist revolutions in the twentieth century—in Russia and in
China—cast serious doubt on this presumption. Additional advances
by the communists could only unnerve Americans further.

During the Cold War, the term "national security" often
supplanted "national interest" in American political
parlance. And security connoted not simply physical security—the
ability to fend off foreign attack—but also psychological security.
In no other way can the hysteria that gripped the United States during the
McCarthy era be explained. Indeed, by most measures the United States was
more secure than it had ever been. Its power—military, economic,
political—compared to its closest rivals had never been greater.
Americans, however, often acted as though they were in greater danger than
ever. Red screenwriters and pink professors apparently lurked in every
studio and on every campus, ready to deliver America to communist tyranny;
accordingly, Congress and the courts mobilized to identify and silence
them. Nationalism in Iran and land reform in Guatemala aimed a dagger at
America's heart; the Eisenhower administration sent secret warriors
to overthrow the offending regimes.

Although much of the danger existed only in American heads (and on the
agendas of those elected officials, bureaucrats, arms makers, and others
who had profit and career incentives to magnify the communist threat), it
was not entirely fabricated. In 1949 the Soviet Union broke the U.S.
nuclear monopoly; by the mid-1950s, the Soviet air force possessed
hydrogen bombs and long-range bombers; and by the early 1960s,
Moscow's strategic rocket forces could deliver the big bombs across
oceans and over the pole. For centuries, other countries had lived with
the threat of imminent physical attack, but until now the twin moats of
the Atlantic and Pacific had protected the United States and allowed
Americans the luxury of time in organizing armies when war did come. The
nuclear revolution in military technology erased the oceans and collapsed
time; with luck, Americans might now get twenty minutes' warning of
Soviet attack. By definition, paranoia is unreasonable, but it is not
always unexplainable. If the American definition of national security
exhibited a certain paranoia during the Cold War—and it
did—the country's unaccustomed vulnerability to sudden and
potentially annihilating attack was as good an explanation as any.